09.27.20
Gemini version available ♊︎OSI President: Most or Half of the OSI’s Money (Even Individual Donors’ Money) Goes to a Microsoft-Led Initiative
Microsoft Initiative or Open Source Initiative? Can’t be both.
Summary: The OSI has turned from advocate of “Open Source” (a disingenuous attempt to set aside Free/libre software) to advocate of Microsoft and GitHub in just 3 years (since taking Microsoft’s money/bribes)
OUR regular readers may still recall that the OSI’s sole member of staff left a couple of months ago, only months after one OSI co-founder quit in protest and another OSI co-founder was banned from the mailing list (for confronting a threat to the OSI’s mission).
Basically, the General Manager quit without and before finding a successor and in his place they temporarily put a person who had raised money from Microsoft for two years in a row. Quite the accomplishment, eh? As we put it a few weeks ago, “The Open Source Initiative in 2020 is Purely Farcical“. The money from Microsoft isn’t a donation; there are strings (conditions) attached to it. No wonder the OSI's blog quickly became a Microsoft marketing tool.
“The money from Microsoft isn’t a donation; there are strings (conditions) attached to it.”According to the above video, the OSI receives about $20,000 a year from individual members, still about 5% of the whole (the rest is large corporations, as before), so it’s effectively the same as when we last looked at it. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is so upset that we point this out, based on their own IRS filings. All they can resort to is then ad hominem attack (which is what they did; I get attacked for stating facts).
Now, as per the above admission, it’s even worse than we imagined. He says that twice the budget (or most of it) goes to ClearlyDefined. It gets about half the budget (no question about it, as he’d know as a former treasurer) and it’s a very big deal. The ClearlyDefined people hide their identity and hide behind CloudFlare, but it’s not hard to know who they really are.
ClearlyDefined was pushed by Jeff McAffer (Microsoft) and then by Microsoft inside the OSI’s board (and blog) in 2018 and in 2019. In 2018 he wrote: “The team in Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office has been contributing to this project and is a part of the community growing around the technology, curation, and upstream work. We are very excited to help develop ClearlyDefined along with many other organizations, companies, and individuals who are producing and/or consuming open source. Every day we are engaging with more and more open source teams. ClearlyDefined is crucial to understanding the nature of their code. We love the mindset and the project fits seamlessly into our engaged approach to open source.”
“ClearlyDefined was pushed by Jeff McAffer (Microsoft) and then by Microsoft inside the OSI’s board (and blog) in 2018 and in 2019.”The OSI’s press release says “ClearlyDefined community has already curated licensing data for 1,000 of the most popular projects on GitHub and in key package management ecosystems. [...] Jeff McAffer of the ClearlyDefined project team.”
A Microsoft employee; we wrote about it many times before. We’ve always pointed out that ClearlyDefined is advocated almost solely and exclusively by Microsoft staff, people of the same group that phoned my employer in an effort to cause me trouble. They’re thugs, albeit they try to disguise themselves as protectors of manners or whatever.
The above clip is a portion from around 25:30 – 29:00 of this new video. From the video’s description: “Thank you to our Video Recordings Sponsor eng@salesforce!” (Also notice that this has only corporate sponsors, so OSI is basically an extension of corporations)
“Video Recordings Sponsor” (all capitalised) is Salesforce, which recently became notorious for laying off a lot of staff, but not the OSI's pawn (President).
“We’ve always pointed out that ClearlyDefined is advocated almost solely and exclusively by Microsoft staff, people of the same group that phoned my employer in an effort to cause me trouble.”Well, that’s his employer, with proprietary software to do this group chat/call. Readers must recall that this is the company whose head staff was pushing not only to oust Stallman but everyone who supported Stallman as well (collective assassination), in effect trying to kill the whole FSF. Not too long ago the Open Source Initiative (OSI) added more of Microsoft's people as well as money.
One final point: does that look like the Open Source Initiative’s President uses Open Source on his desktop? Hard to tell from that video. Here’s a screenshot that exposes a little of the top-left side. █
ᶃ Gemini Space
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